Sunday, 16 August 2009

Now I'm no hippy but...

Whilst wandering through TED videos the other day on my 'Mother TED' application on my Android HTC Magic I found this video from 2005 that I'd not seen before, with Bono making his requests for the 3 wishes that TED granted him :-

Yes it's 27mins long- but spare the time, it's worth it and at least we're able to watch it...

The thing that startled, depressed and really bothered me is that how relevant all of the points Bono makes are, and that they are all still (sadly) valid :(

I understand from here that there was some good reasoning made in '05/'06 as to the technical challenges, and why the 3rd wish hasn't yet been granted. However 4 years is a very long time in technlogy, so I'm intrigued as to what is possible today and tomorrow.

So hopefully ignoring all the 'feel good' bull associated with corporate social responsibility, I've decided to build in a couple of my own questions into the meetings, presentations and pitches that get made to me by large vendors re technology that they want me to approve or purchase. Namely the following :-

1) I want the first content slide presented to me to be a statement from your company re it's position, status, plan & contribution to the three wishes stated in Bono's video

2) I want the second content slide presented to me to detail your companies contribution to charities, help and aid, specific projects as % of revenue and profit.

I used to work in a company where all our purchase request costs were reported internally in terms of the qty of products we needed to sell in order to generate the funds to pay for the request - I wonder how many IT people are able to do this today? I wonder how many would be brave enough to think of them in terms of lives in less fortunate countries?

As I'm prohibited from declaring the IT 'street' prices I'm aware of and then comparing then to aid impacts - I'll just leave it with the questions "is that storage price really good value?" and "why is data on an array invested in more than a life in Africa?"

No comments:

Post a Comment

Pages

About Me

Scottish pessimist - IT infrastructure architecture and strategy in large telco.
Storage is my speciality but am also a stealth Rhubarb picker, Cricket watcher, TVR driver and Laser sailer.
The views & comments on this blog are my personal ones, and are not vetted or represent any past, current or future employers. Oh and the speiling and gammar could be a bit duff :)